John Cromwell | Double Harness / 1933

the business of marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery), John Cromwell (director)

Double Harness / 1933

 

Double Harness is precisely the kind of rhetorical ugly duckling which John Cromwell and his favorite screenwriter Jane Murfin loved to whip up into a passable entertainment, a badly written play with a central theme that Murfin could turn into a witty work that basically kept to home in the drawing and dining room of wealthy and refined individuals such, as in this case, Ann Harding playing Joan Colby—from a proper, well-to-do but currently down-on-its-finances family—and William Powell as John Fletcher, sophisticate heir to a wealthy but slowly-going-broke father who owns a famous cruise line. Harding’s credentials as a queen of the cool beauties are sung out as adjectives even by the sometimes cruelly cynical David Thomson: “Elegant, refined, serene, classy, superior, noble aristocratic—perhaps patrician….” And as anyone can tell you who’s seen

him in The Thin Man films, My Man Godfrey, or the later Ninotchka, Powell has the kind of indolent intelligence that women can’t resist. (It is strange, however, that while one recognizes him as wonderfully flirtatious with the opposite sex, one finds it hard to imagine him actually having sex with his female conquests.) In this film he is perfect for his role often described as a “lazy playboy,” words I find don’t truly apply to his real talents as a couch-sitting seducer.

      It doesn’t truly matter since the level-headed Joan, observing her younger spoiled sister Valerie (Lucile Browne) about to be married, is totally ready to be seduced. For all of her high-minded disinterest in the men previously paraded before her, she has determined to capture the man whom her father, Colonel Sam Colby (Henry Stephenson), most detests, and plots her strategy as if, as she describes it to Valerie, she were going about a business transaction. Long before Tina Turner wondered “what’s love gotta to do with it?” The “virginal, yet alluring” Joan—as John describes her—argues that marriage has nothing to do with love. “Marriage is a business, at least a woman’s business.” Love, in short, is just a second-hand emotion.

      Allowing herself to be seduced, she slowly pulls the playboy of the western world to the edge, and when he’s still not ready to jump, afraid that he might return to his previous playmate Monica Page (Lilian Bond), Joan manipulates the situation by bringing in the incensed conservative Colonel to demand that Fletcher do the right thing by her, that is if she will have him. And Joan most certainly will “have him,” by this time having totally fallen in love with her target.

     John almost passively agrees to the marriage only because, as he reports to her as the Fletcher-owned ship pulls out of port for their honeymoon, divorce is easier. Chastened, she forces him to agree to a sixth month waiting period during which she manages not only to send him off to his previously unused office, which he discovers he truly enjoys and actually has a talent for the work he does there. The shipping line is improving its business, and to make sure of its total rebound she invites an old family friend to dinner, the current Postmaster General Oliver Lane (Wallis Clark) who might possibly assign delivery of US overseas mail to the Fletcher line.

     While dining with a friend at a restaurant where they spot John and his past lover Monica, Joan cinches her husband’s love and respect by stopping by the table and asking Mrs. Page to join them for a weekend outing. If she has tricked him into marriage, she seems to have finally come to make him realize that she is a proper mate. That night he brings home her favorite flowers, gladiolas.

    Unfortunately, there is still a fly buzzing around those lovely blossoms. The spendthrift Valerie confides to Joan that she has made clothes purchases of $1,000 which she cannot pay and dare not tell her husband Dennis for fear of his leaving her. She begs her sister to help her out. Unfortunately, this is not the first time she has asked for such sums, and Joan, who has paid out from her own monies, refusing to take from John’s income, has nothing left. She is willing to see if they might sell her mother’s ring, but it brings in only $500. In the meantime, Valerie has gotten $1,000 from her father, and when her sister is unable to come up with the same sum, approaches John, this time claiming it is for their overdue rent, he being only too ready to write out a check.

      Overhearing the transaction, however, Joan angrily intrudes, demands she hand over the check, and tears it up, the truth about Valerie’s outrageous expenditures for herself finally revealed to everyone. In revenge, Valerie reveals Joan’s deceit, pointing out Joan’s call to her which has precipitated their father’s visit. Taken aback by how he has been manipulated into the relationship, John leaves Joan without even permitting her further explanation.

      In one of the very best of the drawing scenes of this film, Joan visits John at Monica’s apartment, forced in front of “the other woman” to reveal her relief that he finally knows the truth, and to tell him the real reason for her trick, that by that time she had truly come to love him. She leaves without making “a scene,” but still not knowing whether or not her comments have made any difference.

     When he doesn’t show up to the grand dinner she has planned with the US Postmaster, however, she can only imagine the worst. And in a brief series of farcical disasters approaching screwball comic proportions—a scene that might have been much funnier in the hands of a less staid and fussy director such as Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks—the dinner falls apart, despite the fact that as everyone else disappears, with only Joan and the Postmaster left all alone at the table, he tells her that he will assign the US mails to the Fletcher shipping line. Suddenly John finally appears, another box of gladiolas in hand.

      Both wife and husband have clearly learned their lesson: love is all there is.

    In the end, accordingly, it is hard to not at least come to grow fond of this ugly duckling. And excellent scenes by the supporting cast help the heart grown even fonder, particularly as performed the butler Freeman (Reginald Owen) whose character reads as if he were meant to be gay, even though Owen does not play him in that manner. When Freeman proclaims to his master, for example, that things have improved since his marriage, John asks him why, if he is so fond of the results of matrimony he himself hasn’t married, Freeman answers, “Why I’m far too selfish.” And later he and the Chinese cook get into a kitchen brawl that might have been perfect for someone like Eric Blore and Wong Chung (who performed the cook in this movie).

      The very first scene, wherein Valerie is shopping with her sister and father for her wedding dress and trousseau, moreover, features the usual pansy of the period, in which Fredric Santley plays the prissy, handkerchief flouting fairy, owner of the dress shop, Bruno spouting lines such as “You should feel the material on that one Miss Valerie, I literally tingle when I touch it.” A little later, after having run up charges for Valerie of $3,600, he warbles into her sister’s ear, “Why don’t you let me have my way with you this Spring Miss Joan?” A wardrobe, not sex is on his mind.

      Santley performs the lines just perfectly, but what is truly interesting about this scene, in this instance, is that the role was originally assigned to the sometimes drag queen, more often tuxedoed comic emcee Jean Malin who is often described as the queen and creator of the “pansy craze.” It

is hard to even imagine how “over-the-top” his performance must have been to have then RKO studio president B. B. Kahane fire him, declaring after witnessing his flamboyant act, "I do not think we ought to have this man on the lot on any picture — shorts or features.”*

       I’d love to have seen those daily rushes, resulting in such astounding homophobia over a purposely pansy scene.

 

* Brett L. Abrams, Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).